Recent study of near-death experience survivors flies in the face of neuroscience's assertion about NDEs.

photo by Carl A

According to science's current model, your minute-by-minute experience -- all your thoughts, feelings, and emotions -- are a product of your brain. Neuroscientists are especially fond of this worldview and as a result have been extremely resistant to near-death experience research suggesting cardiac arrest patients experience hyper-lucid, conscious experiences during a time when their brain is severely compromised.

One often repeated speculation among neuroscientists has been that NDEs are a dream-like, after-the-fact recreations. But a recently published study from the University of Liège in Belgium compared the memories of NDEs with memories of others who were in coma without an NDE. They found that memories of NDEs are significantly different from coma patients without an NDE. In particular they have significantly more characteristics, like visual details, memory clarity, self-referential information (being involved in the event) and emotional content.

The researchers propose that NDEs can't be considered as imagined events, which have significantly fewer characteristics. NDE events are really perceived but since the events did not occur in reality and likely result from physiological conditions (e.g., neurological dysfunction), the events are actually hallucinatory (see also ULg video). This conclusion is based on assumptions that are inconsistent with other evidence from NDEs. Other interpretations are possible.

Seven researchers from the University of Liège, led by Dr. Steven Laureys, published a report in the peer-reviewed scientific journal PLoS ONE on the characteristics of memories from near-death experiences compared with the memories from others who were in coma but did not report an NDE. The study also compared NDE memories with memories of real events and imagined events (e.g., past dreams or fantasies).

This finding is a direct challenge to neuroscientists, and other NDE-non-believers who proposed that NDEs are dream-like memories of events that never happened, or are altered memories of real events which are partly or fully imagined.

The study's researchers included 21 patients who suffered from an acute brain insult and coma. The patients were divided into three groups: those reporting an NDE (≥ 7 on the Greyson scale, N=8), those reporting memories during coma but without an NDE (< 7 on the Greyson scale, N=6) and those reporting no memories of their coma (N=7). These three groups were all similar in etiology of the brain insult (traumatic, anoxic, hemorrhagic, metabolic and encephalopathic etiologies), as well as age and time since insult. The 21 coma patients were also compared with 18 healthy control subjects.

The researchers measured the memory characteristics of patients using the Memory Characteristics Questionnaire (MCQ), comparing the target memories (NDE or coma memories) versus memories of real events and imagined events (e.g., past dreams or fantasies). The memory characteristics included sensory details (visual, auditory, etc.), memory clarity (e.g., mentally reliving the events when remembering), self-referential information(memories of being involved in the eve...